Every so often a book comes along which completely redefines the genre by challenging its borders, by tossing aside all its overused trappings, by reshaping and reinventing what we perceive to be genre fiction while moving us to reexamine the world in which we live. THE INDIFFERENCE OF HEAVEN does these things in spades. I'll never be able to look upon the line 'Once Upon a Time' again without thinking of Gary A. Braunbeck and the children of Chiaroscuro.
���� -- author Brian A. Hopkins on Braunbeck's new novel, The Indifference of Heaven
Gary A. Braunbeck is the best-kept secret in horror literature today.
Relatively few horror fans have heard of him. This is because he has mainly been writing and publishing short stories (I think he's had something close to 200 stories published at this point, many of which regularly end up in "Best Of" anthologies) and unfortunately most people just don't read short stories these days.
It is doubly unfortunate that short fiction gets overlooked because Braunbeck's first short story collection, Things Left Behind, is astonishingly good. It is by turns touching, horrifying, and brilliant. The collection sold out soon after it was printed, but fans can still find copies here and there. I'm really, really hoping that a larger publisher will pick it up and release it in a mass market or trade paperback version so that more people can read it, because it really is amazing.
Braunbeck writes mainly in the horror genre, I believe mostly because he's seen way more than his share of personal horror and disaster. I attended a reading he gave at ConText, a small SF con in Columbus, OH, and he prefaced his story by saying he'd written it in memory of his twin brother, who suffocated while they were being born. Another fine story, "Small Song", is dedicated to his one and only daughter, who died soon after she was born. He's seen war through the eyes of his father, who was badly wounded in WWII and who liberated two of the Nazi's worst concentration camps ("But Somewhere I Shall Wake" is based on a few of his father's war experiences).
I don't know what else he has been through, but when you meet him in person, you'll notice that he's got the demeanor of a man who's really been through a whole lot in his time here on Earth. His horror writing is a reflection of that, and I get the feeling much of his fiction is far more autobiographical than one could even guess.
He also seems to be a man of great passion and compassion, and his horror is a reflection of that, too. Certain horror fans who read just for the cheap thrill of seeing mindless splatter and heartless destruction won't like Braunbeck's work, because his novels and stories have real pain, real soul. Much of his work is deeply emotionally affecting, and unfortunately there are horror fans out there who don't want to deal with real emotions in the stories they read.
Braunbeck doesn't just write horror, though. He's done westerns, fantasy, mysteries (if you've read any of the "Cat Crimes" anthologies, you'll have read some of his work) and a good bit of science fiction. His first novel, in fact, was Time Was, the first novel in the Isaac Asimov's I-Bots series. I heard he inherited only a chapter and outline from his co-author Steve Perry, and that Braunbeck had less than six weeks to write and turn in the rest of the novel (I've read some of Perry's work, and as far as I can tell, the prose in Time Was is all Braunbeck). Time Was is pretty darned good for a work-for-hire series novel, even when you don't consider the time crunch he was working under. It's an entertaining, fast-paced novel, and I expect In Hollow Houses, a work-for-hire recently released by Wizards of the Coast, to be an excellent read as well.
But I'm really looking forward to the release of The Indifference of Heaven, his first "real" novel. What I read on the Dark Planet site is pretty amazing. I really do hope Braunbeck can do more original novels and less work-for-hire in the future. He puts out an amazing amount of work, and it would be a real shame if he got burned out writing other people's stories in order to make a living before he has the chance to do his own work.
Here are some assorted links to Braunbeck's work around the Web:
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I'll add more links when I find them.
Braunbeck has a home page that is still mostly under construction. Right now I think he's probably too busy writing novels to mess with HTML. If you want to contact him, you can send him an e-mail.
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This page was updated on 3/15/01. If you have any comments, write me at [email protected] (be sure to take out the NOSCHPAM part first).